Comment by kortilla

Check out Destiny Disrupted. It covers how the Middle East and China both had technology opportunities much earlier but were missing the right economic incentives at the time to handle the disruption to the labor force that came with the Industrial Revolution.

Essentially the major societies before ended up in local maximums because they didn’t have the ruthlessness of capitalism or the economic desperation to adopt technologies that in the short term would unemploy large portions of society and wipe out old power structures.